In the past year, Mr. Hockey and I have been to four weddings. There was a post-covidian explosion of love. And because I hadn’t been to a wedding since 2018,... more
It isn’t the first potato truck I learned to drive, but it’s the same kind, a retrofitted army truck, rugged and simple in accord with its unstoppable American design. When the engine cranks and comes to life — as it has for 50 years, and will for 50 more — patriotic old men, many of them farmers, know to thank Detroit. But we’ve sold her. We’re thinning the fleet. A farm in Vermont wants this one. Almost all of our harvest trucks have a military surplus pedigree. With this pedigree comes a year. One of the oldest trucks, one we ...
19 Dec 2024 by Marilee Foster
The solstice is just a moment, a moment when the planet’s tilt has reached obliquity and now it shall begin its trip back the other way. This moment took place early last Saturday, and by now our days will have begun to grow longer. Only it won’t feel like that. Winter begins with a sun that seems stalled in the southern sky. The days are very short and sometimes cold; frost is preserved on the backsides of buildings. Out on the East End of Long Island, on the South Fork, in a low-lying land we still call Sagaponack, things stop ...
by Marilee Foster
Bang! There I was, stopped, sitting in a traffic jam on Route 58, or Old Country Road, in Riverhead two weeks ago, and … bang! It felt like my Toyota Prius was collapsing. My little car was struck by an auto that had been behind me, which was hit by a vehicle behind it. And then my car was pushed into a car in front of it in the pile-up. No one was hurt. But as Phil Hattorff, the owner of Phil’s Auto & Truck Repair, whose tow truck carried my car away, commented at the scene, my Prius was ...
by Karl Grossman
The Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a private research facility in Suffolk County, which operated from 1910 to 1939, was pivotal to the spread of eugenics through the United States and the world, as detailed in a forthcoming book by Mark A. Torres, “Long Island and the Legacy of Eugenics: Station of Intolerance.” Ultimately discredited as a pseudoscience, eugenics “aimed to develop a master race of human beings,” notes Torres. On its website, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, in a section labeled “History,” has an essay on a “historical perspective on genetics” headlined: “Good genes, bad science.” ...
16 Dec 2024 by Karl Grossman
Did you know: Breakfast is now served at Tiffany’s? Daniel Boulud opened the Blue Box Café at the Fifth Avenue flagship store. My daughter Melissa and I spent a night in the city specifically to be on line in front of the iconic building. We couldn’t get a reservation for the day when we had theater tickets, but six seats are reserved for walk-ins, as well as seven seats at the bar. We were the first on line. After the doors opened, we were escorted to the elevators that took us to the sixth-floor home department and the café. True ...
by Denise Gray Meehan
Now come the shortest days, and we offset the long nights with lights and little candles everywhere. In a show of determination and defiance, decor is how we get through the darkest days merrily. I do not rationalize the need to decorate, and I do not fight the urge. Instead, I consider what is durable and plentiful. If I hang it from a bespoke wire hook, will people grasp the symmetry and austere beauty? Will they flock to my booth at the craft market? We had a bumper garlic crop. And sales were slack. So, going into soup season, we’ve ...
10 Dec 2024 by Marilee Foster
The major World War II event we take notice of every December is Pearl Harbor. But this month also sees the 80th anniversary of another significant event in World War II: On December 18, 1944, Typhoon Cobra almost destroyed the 3rd Fleet in the Pacific Ocean. Remarkably, what happened thousands of miles away in the southwest Pacific has several personal and local connections. One personal connection is that Jim Clavin, my father’s older brother, was on one of those ships. I don’t recall him ever talking about it, and it was years after his death when I first learned of ...
9 Dec 2024 by Tom Clavin
Before the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Suffolk County became “the global center of the eugenics movement,” eugenics had roots in England, relates Mark A. Torres in his forthcoming book, “Long Island and the Legacy of Eugenics: Station of Intolerance.” He notes how, in 1851 in England, Herbert Spencer penned a book, “Social Statics,” that “first publicized the phrase ‘survival of the fittest.’” And “less than a decade later, Charles Darwin popularized the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ in his seminal work ‘The Origin of the Species.’ Yet another Englishman, Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, then authored a book, ...
by Karl Grossman
Tracy Grathwohl on Sep 5, 2022